This blog is all about my little seed farm in Victoria, Australia. Follow my progress as I grow and sell rare, unusual and heritage vegetable seed for local seed companies.
I have nearly ten acres now of urban farm, using empty house blocks as well as a small rural block. Check in often to see what I am up to.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Zucchini woes and taking over the polyhouse

With the zucchini plants dying down I went out today to collect seeds from the hand pollinated fruit.
All was good until I got to my weird looking 'Butt Ugly'. I smashed open the two fruits with a hammer and low and behold - no seeds. Well, the seeds had aborted early. After a bit of digging I managed to find two precious, viable seeds.
I now know why the plants from that batch of seed have all been different, I am guessing that the original zucchini (C. pepo) that I got those seeds from has crossed with a different cucurmis species, I guess a C. moschata). It is a rare, but not impossible, cross and I am going to treasure those seeds so I can see what they produce next spring.

To prevent crossing and make it easier for seed production I generally plant one of each type of pumpkin/squash/ zucchini in each block but it seems that it wasn't enough this time. I am pleased though as it gave me something interesting to work with.

My stocks of Aracacha and cocoyam are outgrowing my little poly row cover so my mother has allowed me to use the polyhouse that we usually use for our house vegetables for these frost tender plants.

With our climate we can grow most of our veg outside so we haven't been using the polyhouse to its fullest anyway so it is no big loss.

As you can see, I will have to do some work to clean it up and refill the raised beds but at least I don't have to spend a thousand dollars on a polycarbonate hothouse as I was thinking about doing.

I will be very pleased to have somewhere big enough for those rare South American plants and be able to grow enough to perhaps sell some of the offsets.

Yay, the forcast is showing that we should get a couple of inches of rain over the next few days. Maybe I will be forced to get my sadly neglected paperwork done while I am inside grinning at the rain on the roof.

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About Me

I live in Victoria, Australia. I used to travel with my pack donkeys and live in the Australian bush but now that I am settled in a small town I am working for myself growing unusual fruits and vegetables.
I have started a small market garden to sell fresh heirloom fruit and veg at the local markets.